Japan’s 3D CG feature “Friends”

Here’s a wild looking kids film coming later this year from Japan, Friends (mononoke shima no Naki). Toho is planning to qualifying it for an Academy Award. Is this Japan’s first feature-length 3D CG-animated film?

Oh, little one! Whose rear end will you torch next? I actually thought it was really cool seeing the super-stylized human villagers, like the elder. And I enjoyed the CG interpretation of a lot of exaggerated anime expressions. Beautiful scenery.

I hope having a varied diet of film making methods in at least one country will lead to such a broader public view of what animation is internationally. Maybe if Japan can do cgi features the west can have drawn animation with grown up themes? …Please?

Do you think there is a wide audience in the West that desires hand drawn animation with adult themes, or is it mostly people working in the animation industry and smaller cult audiences? The films in theaters are doing so well! I wonder if the movie going audience craves new and different animated films. I personally think an adult film could work better as hand drawn than CG though I could be wrong on that.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason to suppose the wealth and variety of audiences that live action enjoys for example, do not exist for animation. In Japan it is simply accepted that hand drawn animation can be for young and old audiences of all tastes. All we can do as animators is not censor ourselves in the work we produce and create honest work that we think is worth watching and leave the audience targeting to the distributors.

This looks amazing! I hope it gets some kind of distribution in the UK so I can see it. So exciting to see something that uses CGI in a creative and innovative way.

lovely jubbly.

Rufus

I guess this means we finally find out what happened to Ross & Rachael.

Ok, bad joke. Reminds me of a Dreamworks feature.

Silence Dogood

Its like Monsters Inc in Middle Earth.
Interesting.

Richard Bradford

That’s what i was thinking as well.

MadRat

Actually it’s a Japanese version of Shrek. I saw a version of this story when I was a kid and like most trailers, hides some of the details of the story like the fact that the original was a tear jerker. The original story is about a red ogre and a blue ogre. The red guy wants to be friends with some kids, but he’s an ogre so they’re afraid of him. The blue guy, his best friend, terrorizes the kids’ village so the red guy will seem more friendly. It works! But the blue guy is beat up and chased off by the villagers. The the red guy realizes his best friend got hurt for his sake, they’ll be separated forever and bursts into tears (not that I blame him).

tonma

Lord let this be something original and new, and not a bunch of bad influences from the west.
From this clip with no subtitles it’s hard to tell…..

Production I.G is currently working on a 3D-ified CG-version of the CYBORG 009 franchise.

Did Studio 4c finish working on their 3D project called AMBIENT LOVE, directed by Koji Morimoto? Dunno if it was a short or a feature, though.

In any case, this looks more like a film that would be released in the west… Crazily-designed alien-type characters who have a run-in with bad (human) luck. The two buddies have to figure out how to solve their problem and make peace with the strange (human) world in the process.

Chris Sobieniak

It certainly appears to play out like that without knowing what was being said here. Certainly a looser adaptation of the Japanese folktale given the circumstances.

I’ve seen a million anime drawings that look like these characters. They’re mostly in kids fantasy stories that have nothing todo with Dreamworks or Pixar. There have been plenty of Japanese CG films. Final Fantasy Advent Children for example was a huge success. What world do you guys live in?

I can think of several fully CGI films from Japan (To my surprise, Resident Evil: Degeneration and its sequel haven’t been mentioned yet). However, most of them seem to use a good deal of mocap.

Leaving mocap aside, there are still those 3D Pokemon films. Yes, they’re stereoscopic 3D, and they were shown theatrically. But they aren’t feature length.

JMW

Looks like it could play well with kids, but I don’t see the mainstream anime crowd liking it too much.

Personally, I really hope Japan can become a competitor to the US in terms of CGI animation, if only to get an alternative to: “Anthropomorphic thing 5” or “Pop-culture fairy tale 6”. Although, it’s only a matter of time before Japan’s CGI film industry becomes “Stupid tabletop game 7”

Well, this certainly is a departure from what makes Japanese animation interesting.

Japan has been one of the few places on Earth that still appreciates handdrawn animation——-not so much for it’s realism but its appeal in pushing the illustrative interpretation of the characters and the action. (almost to the point of iconic)

With the exception of Katsuhiro Otomo’s works, Japanese animation has never been big on “acting” (but big on story) in animation.

I dunno about this. Jury is still out on this. Just hope this is is not a sign of Japanese producers about to drink the CG animation Kool-aid.

Clint H

I’m not a fan of anime that much, but this looks awesome! Looks wild and colouful, just the way I like my cartoons. Chances are this might not get an English dub, because it looks like it shares similarities with MONSTERS INC. , and the mouth movements seem to go well with the Japanese dialogue, and it’ll just look weird if it were dubbed into English. Still, looks great!

Andrew Kieswetter

Looks great. It looks like its derived from the Japanese fairy tale of Momotaro the peach boy.